Jerry Falwell

The Reverend Jerry Falwell, the American television evangelist who died on
Tuesday aged 73, was credited with waking the sleeping giant of his
country’s politics — the United States’s 21 million fundamentalist
Christians — and turning it into a force no politician could ignore.

Jerry FalwellPhoto: AP

12:01AM BST 16 May 2007

Falwell began his ministry as a leading exponent of the “electronic church”. Through his Old-Time Gospel Hour, relayed over 390 television stations in America and abroad, he claimed to reach 18 million souls a week with his message of salvation.

In 1979 he formed Moral Majority Inc, a conservative political lobbying organisation with a membership estimated at two million. Calling on Americans to reject the “politicisation of immorality in our society”, he organised the registration of millions of new voters, informed them of the voting records of their elected representatives on key issues and mobilised his supporters into a huge political action movement.

Jerry Falwell was born on August 11 1933 at Lynchburg, Virginia, into a well-to-do, but not well-respected, family. His father owned the local power company, ran a dance hall and trucked bootleg liquor during prohibition; a heavy drinker, he shot and killed his own brother before Jerry was born and eventually died in 1948 of alcoholism at the age of 55.

At Brookville high school Jerry Falwell excelled in sports, but was prevented from giving a speech at graduation after the authorities found that he and other athletes had obtained free meals by using forged lunch tickets. In 1950 he enrolled at Lynchburg College to study Mechanical Engineering, but before completing his course he became a born-again Christian and transferred to the Baptist Bible College at Springfield, Missouri.

After graduation he returned to Lynchburg, where he founded an independent Baptist church in an abandoned building owned by the Donald Duck Bottling Company. His first congregation numbered 35 people.

Related Articles

The catalyst for Falwell’s conversion was Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, a radio show hosted by an early broadcasting evangelist, Charles E Fuller. In Lynchburg, Falwell set to work to win souls for Jesus, and embarked on an aggressive campaign of door-to-door evangelism. Within his first week he had also started a half-hour radio broadcast and, six months later, his first religious television programme, The Old Time Gospel Hour.

By the end of his first year the church had 864 regular worshippers. By 1969 the congregation had risen to 10,000. In addition to tithing, Falwell’s church drew large sums through gifts from the audience of The Old Time Gospel Hour. With the proceeds Falwell set up homes for alcoholics and unmarried mothers, a school, a bus service to help people attend church, a free summer camp for children, a Bible institute and, in 1971, a seminary, Lynchburg Baptist College.

By the mid-1970s the college, renamed Liberty Baptist College, had become an accredited institution. “God’s done something at Liberty Baptist College” ran one of Falwell’s commercials: “We don’t have any gay organisations on campus. We believe homosexuality is a moral perversion. There are no co-ed dorms. We don’t allow the use of tobacco. We have no beer halls. We have prayer rooms. We have curfews. Don’t come here if you are liberal. We are committed to the conservative perspective. We’re not liberal. We don’t even like the word. This school is not for everyone. Here, everyone is for Jesus. Here you can tell boys from girls.”

Despite this endorsement, by the 1990s Liberty Baptist College had become the largest institution of its kind in America, contributing an annual $80 million to the local economy. The list of speakers at its events read like a Who’s Who of Republicanism and included Presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan, political aspirants Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator Jesse Helms and Justice Clarence Thomas.

At first Falwell insisted that true believers should be apolitical, but in the late 1970s, stirred by what he saw as the undermining of family values by Washington liberals, he began to campaign on such issues as abortion, homosexuality, pornography and gambling. Homosexuality was a particular obsession; Aids he regarded as “not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals”.

In June 1979, acting as a “private citizen”, but with the active support of Republican strategists such as Paul Weyrich, Falwell founded Moral Majority as a “political-moral” campaigning organisation. “We must, from the highest office in the land right down to the shoeshine boy in the airport, have a return to Biblical basics,” he declared.

As well as the teaching of creationism in schools and opposition to feminism, homosexuals and abortion, “Biblical basics” also included support for nuclear weapons, the free market and cuts in welfare spending. Although Falwell denied being politically partisan, when Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory over Jimmy Carter in November 1980 he boasted that Moral Majority had registered some four million new voters and urged a further 10 million to go to the polls. Reagan’s victory, he said, had been a triumph for “American morality”.

Falwell struck a deep chord in millions of Americans, many of whom probably did not share his theological position. He was a political natural, relishing debate with such standard-bearers of liberalism as Senator Edward Kennedy. He silenced rowdy audiences with his wit and folksy manner: “You can’t shock me,” he told jeering students at Princeton. “I’ve spoken at Harvard.”

But celebrity was a two-edged sword, and as he basked in the political spotlight Falwell’s sometimes bizarre religious beliefs and his tendency to go too far embarrassed his allies and provoked public ridicule. To the faithful, Falwell prophesied an imminent Apocalypse, before which true believers would be “raptured” out of their clothes to sit at God’s right hand with a ring-side seat at the battle of Armageddon. (A precondition, which explained his fervent support for Zionism, if not for Jews, was that Israel should expand to occupy its “Biblical lands”).

He was prone to give gloating sermons describing the plane crashes and car wrecks that would occur among the ungodly as the saved were whisked heavenwards from behind the wheel. In 1983 he took the publisher Larry Flynt to court for libel after Flynt’s magazine Hustler ran a parody of a Campari ad in which celebrities talked suggestively of their “first time” (with Campari). The spoof had Falwell owning up that his “first time” was with his own mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued for invasion of privacy, libel and infliction of emotional distress. The case wound up in the Supreme Court, which found for the magazine on all three charges, declaring the joke in the tradition of literary “travesty”.

Falwell did not see the funny side: “If Larry had been physically able and were not in a wheelchair, there’d have been no lawsuit. I’m a Campbell County, Virginia country boy. I’d just take him outside the barn and whip him and that’d be the end of it.”

Falwell’s political views, too, often got him into hot water. He caused an outcry when he sided publicly with the apartheid government in South Africa and described Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a “phoney”. The Roman Catholic Church, which had been supportive, distanced itself from the Moral Majority over Falwell’s support for nuclear weapons. The organisation was eventually wound up in 1989. But Falwell’s self-confidence knew no limits.

When President Clinton got into difficulties over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Falwell was in the vanguard of the moral crusade. In 1994 he issued a direct mail shot asking for contributions to “help me produce a national television documentary which will expose shocking new facts about Bill Clinton”. Falwell took the money and issued a videotape entitled The Clinton Chronicles: An Investigation into the Alleged Criminal Activities of Bill Clinton.

The producer of the tape, Patrick Matrisciana, later confessed to having posed in the video as an anonymous journalist who had alleged that Clinton was killing off whistleblowers who knew too much about his private life. When the fabrication was exposed, Falwell denied having any editorial control over the tape.

Later that year Falwell was banned from broadcasting his Old Time Gospel Hour in Jacksonville, Florida, because viewers had complained that his descriptions of precisely what Clinton had got up to with Ms Lewinsky were too explicit. Mothers complained that their two-year-olds were asking about “oral sex” because they had heard Falwell talking about it on the 700 Club.

During the late 1990s Falwell’s pronouncements became so outlandish that some commentators wondered whether he had gone off the rails. When he insisted that the Antichrist was alive and well — and Jewish — the Newsweek columnist Joe Stein felt driven to own up. When Budweiser produced an advertisement featuring two men holding hands, Falwell accused the company of presenting the American public with “Bud-drinking homosexual men in a hand-holding posture” and of threatening the “Judaeo-Christian standards on which the nation was founded”.

In 1999, under the headline “Parents’ Alert: Tinky Winky comes out of the closet”, he issued a dire warning about the dubious sexual orientation of the eponymous Teletubby. “He is purple”, Falwell thundered, “the gay pride colour; and his antenna is a triangle, the gay pride symbol.” The final damning proof of Tinky Winky’s homosexuality, it appeared, was that the character carried a handbag.

Falwell’s fulminations provoked a broadside from one Brett Beasley, from North Carolina, a gay computer salesman and former nude model — and a first cousin of Falwell’s . “The name Brett Beasley is not familiar to me,” Falwell announced, “though my mother was a Beasley. I have no knowledge of Brett Beasley, nor his claim to be a homosexual.” “That’s a bald-faced lie,” retorted Beasley. “He stopped by to say hello recently when I was having dinner with my parents at a restaurant.”

But the joke went sour in 2001 when, 48 hours after the September 11 bombings, Falwell joined his fellow evangelist Pat Robertson on the latter’s television show, the 700 Club. “God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve,” said Falwell. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union], People for the American Way [a liberal group], all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen.”

In the furore that followed, Falwell was forced to apologise, claiming somewhat unconvincingly that he had been “taken out of context”. But he did not remain silent. In September 2002 he described the prophet Mohammed as a “terrorist”, provoking riots in India which left eight people dead. A few days later a spokesman for Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa calling for Falwell’s death.

Falwell was, naturally, prepared for any such eventuality. His mansion on a secluded estate at Lynchburg was protected by a high wall and a Bible-quoting guard. Jerry Falwell married, in 1958, Macel Pate, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.